Grace Blogs

I was going to forward this talk on to the Adult Ministry Team (AMT), but I think this would be a good listen for anyone interested in why we teach within the church. It features Pastor Rob Paris, of Wellspring Anglican Church, preaching a message on a Christian view of education in the church. I found it helpful and encouraging.

He closes with what seems to be Wellspring’s vision for education….

We envision multitudes of children and adults delighting themselves in God’s Word and God’s world because they have discovered the life-giving power of His truth and grace. We long to be a learning culture where people study hard to excel in all that they do for the glory of God,

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Listen as J.I. Packer draws to a tight focus the central issue in regard to homosexuality, the Gospel itself. Dr. Packer makes a very lucid argument for why it is the very Gospel of Christ that is at stake when it comes to the issue of same-sex relationships.

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John McCormack of the Weekly Standard tells of the growing contradiction between Barack Obama - “the man of principle” and Barack Obama - “the politician searching for votes.”

McCormack: “During the past week, Obama has proven to be woefully ignorant of abortion law, or he has been deceiving voters about the legality of abortion, as well as his own position on the issue. . . . Are we really supposed to believe that Obama, the former editor of Harvard Law Review and onetime lecturer at the University of Chicago law school, doesn’t understand Roe v. Wade and a bill that he’s co-sponsoring?”

Full Article

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There are few issues like politics that inspire question marks in the minds of Christians. Questions like, Do I vote for a candidate who is “pro-choice” when the other candidate is not only “pro-choice” but “pro-tax”, “pro-big government,” “pro-liberal social programs”, etc? Living in a society in which we are given the freedom to participate in the political process in turn demands that we learn to think through finding balance in how we cast our vote as a follower of Christ. Let’s face it, to abstain completely from voting because a candidate holds a view that you or me would consider to be “unchristian” will leave us with no candidate at all. A person with this …

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As you probably know, we have a team “on mission” with Mustard Seeds and Mountains in McDowell County, West Virginia. We have set up this blog to serve as a message board since “up in the hollers” there is practically no cell phone coverage.

The first two entries come from my wife, Vicki, who happens to have three of our kids with her - Ben, David, and Alexa.

Special Thanks to Will “LEGS” Bowman (team member and hill climbing extraordinaire) for making this connection possible!

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Friday night, Taylor and I went to see Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the new film by actor Ben Stein (you might remember him as the devastatingly boring teacher in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off). Here’s a synopsis from CNS News:

“Expelled” calls attention to the plight of highly credentialed scholars who have been forced out of prestigious academic positions because they proposed Intelligent Design as a possible alternative to Charles Darwin’s 150-year-old theories about the origins of life. Instead of entertaining a debate on the merits of competing theories, the scientific establishment has moved to suppress the ID movement in a “systematic and ruthless” way at odds with America’s founding principles, the film asserts.

This film employs humor and artistic filmmaking techniques …

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One of the main points to remember about our “God Questions” series is that we are seeking to show that Christianity provides a coherent worldview that adequately answers the full range of life’s greatest questions.

It’s a clear sign that you need to rethink your position if you have to use one way of thinking to answer a certain set of questions, but then switch to a different way of thinking to answer others. Case in point: in 2006, Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) was asked about the consistency of his views as an atheist, and it looks like he knows his worldview doesn’t work:

Questioner: …You

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I told last weeks Overflow group that I would post information related to the reliability of the New Testament by scholars who traffic in these types of scholarly issues.

F. E. Peters states that

On the basis of manuscript tradition alone, the works that made up the Christians’ New Testament were the most frequently copied and widely circulated books of antiquity.

John Warwick Montgomery says that

To be skeptical of the resultant text of the New Testament books is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament.

Sir Frederic G. Kenyon, states that
Note: Dr. Kenyon is the director …

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Sherif Girgis, a Rhodes Scholar and a senior studying philosophy major at Princeton, pens a powerful open letter to Barack Obama.

(HT: Justin Taylor)

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